One of the best aspects of working at Pure Storage is helping existing and new potential customers overcome traditional Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) challenges through the simplicity and performance that our product delivers. To that end, we firmly believe and our customers continue to prove that our FlashStack Converged Infrastructure solution is truly the complete package when it comes to providing a turnkey, pre-validated solution that includes everything needed to hit the ground running for your new VDI project or take an existing project to the next level of success. Pure’s all-flash storage integrated with Cisco UCS and Nexus switches enables your VDI and infrastructure administrators to focus on what’s most important: delivering the best VDI experience to your customers, instead of wasting time on mundane and repetitive tasks just to keep the backend infrastructure online.

FlashStack is designed to be fully redundant, with no single point of failure (see diagram below) which enables our customers to perform what were formerly maintenance and administrative operations reserved for the evenings or weekends. Now admins can perform storage firmware upgrades and large recompose operations (just to name a few) in the middle of the workday completely transparently to your active VDI users.

To prove this level of robustness and to provide a blueprint from which customers can construct their own VMware Horizon View deployment, we have updated our VMware Horizon View 6.2 Design Guide with our latest generation product, the FlashArray//m.

Here are a few of the highlights you will find inside:

Mixed workload testing that closely emulates real-world production VDI. Seldom do VDI projects have just a single type of user. Those that do will inevitably grow and look to add additional scope so we decided to perform VDI simulations that are more realistic via Login VSI’s workload mashup feature. The goal being to more clearly demonstrate what a production environment comprised of a mix of Office, Knowledge and Power users looks like from a scaling and performance perspective for up to 1500 concurrent users with room to scale further by adding additional server resources.

Learn about the storage utilization and administrative implications when deciding to use linked-clone desktops, full clone desktops or a combination of both for your implementation.

A fact of VDI life is that things like bootstorms, scanning storms, recompose operations and pool creation can and will occur and/or be necessary at any point in time. How robust your underlying infrastructure is will determine how and if your active VDI users will be negatively impacted while these tasks are ongoing. To confirm that FlashStack provides the ultimate VDI experience, we ran mixed workload VDI simulations with Login VSI in parallel with operations like a bootstorm and pool creation and used the results from Login VSI to confirm that the end-user experience was not impacted whatsoever.

Easy to implement best-practices to optimize your deployment from day one across network, compute, hypervisor and Horizon View components layers. Take the guesswork out of your project with scalable building-blocks and verified sizing recommendations.

Pure Storage all-flash storage significantly increases the capability to address the high demands of a Horizon View deployment. Coupled with the Cisco UCS compute, Nexus network, and the VMware vSphere virtualization platform, FlashStack CI makes it simple to accelerate the deployment of VDI with VMware or Citrix, as well as other solutions such as SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP ERP for organizations of all sizes. In fact, Pure Storage is excellent for the consolidation of multiple mission critical applications. Check out this ESG Lab Validation white-paper on consolidating tier-1 applications including VDI, database, and email.